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Dave James
Feb 08, 2013

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We've all heard about Nvidia's Project Shield, their Android-powered handheld that can plug into your PC and let you play the latest games on a wee mobile device in your hand. Now, to show all that off, Nvidia is posting a weekly series of short videos, called PC Monday, on its blog and YouTube channel.

The lack of input lag is incredibly impressive - even if the rig is only a few feet away. I spoke to one of Nvidia's top tech bods at a small event this week and he said they'd managed to knock the lag on a local network down to just 120ms. For comparison, the lag you get from a wired controller plugged into an Xbox 360 sits at around 150ms.

Obviously all these demonstrations are in very controlled environments to show off the best possible Shield experience, and we won't know how well the local game-streaming tech works in the real world until we get our samples through. But with the release only a matter of months away we ought to know very soon.

Personally I love the idea of having a powerful desktop machine, with the option of using the mouse and keyboard as normal, but with the versatility of playing certain games AFK on my high-def tele from my sofa. But with the Shield likely to be a rather pricey little device it's tough to see how many PC gamers will want to spend the cash on the handheld when they've already forked out a good chunk of cash on a GTX 600 series gaming PC.

Nor is Shield going to be the only device that lets us do this. Theoretically any Nvidia Tegra-powered device ought to be capable of connecting, via GeForce Experience, to your GTX 600 series card or up, once the device and its software is released. That's going to suddenly make Tegra tablets a much more intriguing prospect for us PC gamers.

Check out the next PC Monday on the 11th, though it is running on US time so you UK folk are going to have to wait til the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

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